Foreigner Gopher Omar’s Effort to Conquer America Sells at the New York Times!

THE TIMES COVERS UP FOR OMAR

by John Hinderaker  at  PowerLine:

Of all the Democratic Party press’s efforts to cover up the scandals surrounding Ilhan Omar, that of the New York Times is among the lamest. Linda Qiu purports to fact check the claim that Ilhan Omar was simultaneously married to two men, with one of those marriages–perhaps to her brother–being fraudulent.

Of course, fact checking is easy when you don’t know anything about the facts.

Rumors that Ms. Omar had married her brother have been circulating since 2016, when she ran for state representative in Minnesota. No proof has emerged substantiating these claims.

That is an absurd claim. Investigations by Scott Johnson, David Steinberg, Preya Samsundar, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Minnesota’s Campaign Finance Board have developed a mountain of evidence relating to Omar’s tangled marital history. At a bare minimum, it is known for certain that Omar filed joint tax returns with one man (to whom she was not married) while she was married to someone else–overwhelming evidence that her legal marriage, the one that appears to have been with a brother, was a sham. Filing such false returns is a crime, a fact that evidently troubles the New York Times not at all. And Steinberg’s latest includes persuasive evidence that Elmi is, in fact, Omar’s brother.

Ms. Qiu next recites Omar’s denial of the suspicions that have been raised about her marital history, without noting that she has persistently refused to adduce any evidence in support of her denial, and then goes on to simply recite the chronology that Omar has alleged:

According to that timeline, she applied for a marriage license with Ahmed Hirsi in 2002, but never finalized the application. In 2008, they ended their relationship “in our faith tradition.”

But records show that they continued to live together after that date–indeed, as far as one can tell, continuously to the present.

State records show that in 2009, Ms. Omar legally married Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who she said was a British citizen. They obtained a religious divorce in 2011, according to her timeline, and Mr. Elmi returned to England.

Omar’s story includes multiple references to marriage and divorce in her “faith tradition,” of which apparently there is zero record. I hadn’t realized that Islamic tradition is so casual about marriage and divorce. Curiously, when Omar married Elmi in 2009, the ceremony was performed by a Christian minister.

More importantly, address records show that Omar, Hirsi and Elmi all shared the same residence in 2009 and 2010. This is obviously consistent with her “marriage” to Elmi being a fraud and, as far as I know, there is no evidence of her supposed split with Hirsi, the man with whom she filed joint tax returns but didn’t get around to marrying until 2018.

She then reconciled with Mr. Hirsi and married him legally in January 2018, a month after she legally divorced from Mr. Elmi, according to The Associated Press. She and Mr. Hirsi have three children.

Ms. Qiu doesn’t even mention the strong evidence that Omar committed perjury when she obtained her divorce from Elmi in 2017. She alleged that she had had no contact with Elmi and had no knowledge as to his whereabouts, while photographic evidence shows them together in London.

In 2016, a blog called PowerLine cited a now-deleted post on an internet forum that claimed Mr. Elmi is Ms. Omar’s brother.

We included a screen shot of the “now-deleted post,” which you can see here. Scott verified the marriage dates set out in that post and wrote to Omar, requesting comment. She responded by hiring a criminal defense lawyer who showered Scott with vituperation, but neither at that time nor at any time since has Omar addressed the obvious questions that are raised by publicly available records.

Qiu’s final argument in Omar’s favor is based on her interaction with a Star Tribune reporter:

In 2018, The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Ms. Omar showed a reporter cellphone images of documents from her family’s entry into the United States in 1995. They listed her father and siblings by order of birth, with Ms. Omar listed as the youngest of seven children. Mr. Elmi’s name did not appear in the documents.

Apart from Omar’s mysterious refusal to share copies of these documents with the reporter, the fact that “Mr. Elmi’s name did not appear in the documents” is consistent with what Steinberg has now reported: that Ilhan is not actually a member of the Omar family, and that several members of her biological family, including Mr. Elmi, found asylum in the United Kingdom.

That’s it. Qiu makes no effort to deal with the highly suggestive evidence that has been uncovered. That’s some fact check!

Another broader point should be made: liberal outlets like the Times, and until very recently the Star Tribune, have made no effort to investigate circumstances so suspicious that they would quickly have led to scandal if the Representative in question had been a Republican. Having resolutely failed to investigate or even to ask questions, they purport to resolve the controversy in Omar’s favor by alleging that claims of fraud have not been conclusively proven. They never will be proven, of course, if the liberal press has anything to do with it. The key question now, perhaps, is whether any state or federal law enforcement agencies will charge Omar with crimes. If that happens, her house of cards presumably will collapse.